Rooms Cheap, Drugs Plentiful At N.y. Hotel

January 16, 2006|By Nicholas Confessore The New York Times

NEW YORK — The Greenpoint Hotel is still listed in a few tourist guides, which promise cheap rooms and warn of the brusque if efficient staff. But few map-carrying bargain-hunters stay there these days. The hallways stink of marijuana and urine; the bathrooms -- one per floor -- are caked in dirt, and hot water is rare. The front desk is barricaded shut with sheets of plywood. Theft and violence are a constant threat.

"My room is a box. It's the size of a prison cell," one resident, Jaime Rodriguez, said as he stood outside a deli near the hotel recently, swaying slightly, his eyes cloudy. Rodriguez said he had lived at the Greenpoint for a decade, paying rent with disability checks. "This whole place is a prison," he said.

Single-room-occupancy establishments like the Greenpoint have long occupied the bottom end of the lodging food chain in New York. Renting rooms by the week or month, the better ones serve as cheap housing for the old or ill, or for those who have fallen out of the middle class and are struggling not to fall further. Others mostly house a mix of addicts, AIDS sufferers, the recently homeless and people who are all three.

The Greenpoint falls into this category. It is on the northern end of Manhattan Avenue in Brooklyn, where the antiques stores and Polish delis of the otherwise gentrifying neighborhood shade into bodegas and check-cashing establishments, a few blocks from the brackish Newtown Creek.

Even as flophouses go, the Greenpoint Hotel has an unenviable distinction. According to a motion for foreclosure that federal prosecutors filed in November, the hotel has decayed in recent years into one of the most dangerous SROs in the city -- a Brooklyn version of Manhattan's notorious Kenmore Hotel, where drug dealers and prostitutes ruled until a federal takeover in 1994.

About 20 deaths have occurred in the Greenpoint since 1998. Most of those were due to drug overdoses, but at least one was a drug-related murder, according to the motion filed in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn by the office of the U.S. attorney, Roslynn R. Mauskopf.

Federal prosecutors say most of those were casualties of a sophisticated drug-dealing operation that was run out of the hotel for more than a decade by Rafael Perez, known as Macho, who is awaiting trial. The U.S. attorney's office wants to take over the hotel.

"I'm surprised it took them so long," said Richard Santos, 44, who lived in the Greenpoint for two years and who still hangs around Manhattan Avenue, drinking from a beer bottle in a brown paper bag and asking strangers for change. "Drugs were rampant back then. Management always had a hand in it. There was a drug for every floor."

Workers at the hotel, he said, turned the security cameras on and off to allow dealers and prostitutes to enter the building without being caught on tape. The bodies of those who had overdosed were taken out a back entrance, put into a car trunk, and dumped elsewhere. "With addicts, one dies, another one takes their place," said Santos, who said he was a former heroin addict, onetime crack smoker and an alcoholic.

The hotel's current owners, Max Stark and Sam Pearl of Brooklyn, who bought the hotel in 2003, did not return numerous phone calls to their homes and offices requesting comment.

The Greenpoint has almost 200 rooms, crammed into a maze-like four-story structure. Room numbers are stenciled on with spray paint, and typewritten signs ask residents to refrain from throwing bottles of urine out the windows. The request has frequently gone unheeded. Rent at the Greenpoint is $450 for four weeks.